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Which gfx cards have the best Linux PPC drivers?

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>HyperlogiK<

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Nov 10, 2004
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I was recently offered a dual processor dual core PowerMac G5 for next to nothing and I thought it might be fun to play with as a novelty non x86 item. I am not particularly interested in running an obsolete version of OSX and if I buy the thing I will probably put Linux on it. For obvious reasons I can't use the official drivers from either vendor and I have read several sources indicating that ATI/AMD driver support is substantially better than Nvidia's particularly for 3D acceleration.

Has anyone got direct experience of Linux on PPC? I really just want suggestions for getting the machine setup with the most capable gfx solution I can, ideally with hardware video acceleration. I'd even consider importing an S3 card ;P
 
use debian

all if not most of it's drivers and software found in the repo is ported to ppc
I have a ppc ibbok myself.

edit
any older ati card is not to be used in linux
the open source drivers for them suck the big one, and ati drops support for them them fast, I'd grab a older NV card (if it works hardware wise)
like a fx or 6xxx card


here take a look at this
http://www.debian.org/distrib/packages

looks like there are no ati drivers but it looks like you have nvidia drivers in the stable version
 
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Thanks for the link, I might have made a purchase which I would have regretted otherwise. It looks like I simply might not be able to run any GPU that wasn't shipped for OSX in some form, even under Linux. Stupid Apple and their proprietary firmware!

I'm pretty sure that neither AMD nor Nvidia have released PPC drivers, I think they are all open source efforts. In fact several sources seem to suggest that the usual Linux situation is reversed and that the Geforce driver is flakier than the Radeon one.

Anyway, I have a few 6xxx, 7xxx and X8xx series cards lying about so I can't find out for myself... and post the results so this doesn't become one of those annoying Google results which are the subject of a certain XKCD cartoon.
 
Thanks for the link, I might have made a purchase which I would have regretted otherwise. It looks like I simply might not be able to run any GPU that wasn't shipped for OSX in some form, even under Linux. Stupid Apple and their proprietary firmware!

I'm pretty sure that neither AMD nor Nvidia have released PPC drivers, I think they are all open source efforts. In fact several sources seem to suggest that the usual Linux situation is reversed and that the Geforce driver is flakier than the Radeon one.

Anyway, I have a few 6xxx, 7xxx and X8xx series cards lying about so I can't find out for myself... and post the results so this doesn't become one of those annoying Google results which are the subject of a certain XKCD cartoon.
I don't think the firmware wold stop you
but I could be wrong, I been using none mac hardware on my g3 running linux
 
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